


These Lovely Tales You Tell

by Scuffin_MacGuffin



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-20
Updated: 2011-11-20
Packaged: 2017-10-26 07:32:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/280412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scuffin_MacGuffin/pseuds/Scuffin_MacGuffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Leliana tells stories, and they're the loveliest little things.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	These Lovely Tales You Tell

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [Serindrana](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Serindrana/pseuds/Serindrana). With [indescribably brilliant art](http://payroo.tumblr.com/post/12801638540/aaaaaaaaand-this-is-the-part-where-i-am-creepy-as) by [Payroo!](http://archiveofourown.org/users/payroo/pseuds/payroo)

+

Leliana tells stories, and they're the loveliest little things: bits of language strung together to be heard and laughed at and sighed over, best listened to one after the other, like a plate of pastries scarfed down before they lose their warmth. Bethany bakes well enough and Barlin's girl doesn't, so there's some coin in bringing a basket full of sweet things over to the tavern a few mornings a week for scruffy men to chew on while they try to will away their hangovers. That's the excuse, anyway. Garrett rolls his eyes and makes kissy faces at her. Carver, ever oblivious, just rolls over.

"S'too damned early," he grunts into his pillow, and is back to snoring before Bethany has finished doing up the buckles on her boots.

Mother's eyes follow her out the door, but it's been a long time since her father first said, _She's a big girl, Leandra, she can go by herself.  She'll take the dog,_ and it's a promise that even now echoes through the stale kitchen air. Bethany does go by herself, and she takes the dog too, and with her twin in his bed and her mother at the table, her brother up early tracing out glyphs in the pre-dawn frost and her father's voice ringing rough in all their ears, everyone is accounted for.

With her father's voice in her ears is how she likes best to listen to Leliana's stories. They're the sorts of stories he used to tell: the ridiculous ones Carver had stopped asking for long ago, the ones with little girls who did magic but got to be princesses all the same, and  the wise owl in the oak tree and the five green and speckled frogs (any one of whom might be a prince), and the poor miller's boy and the cat, and the two twins lost in a wood full of witches, only crumbs to guide them home.

"Four and twenty blackbirds," Leliana laughs, biting into the pastry, and Bethany watches the steaming amber juice dribble inevitably out the crease of her mouth, tries not to be too obvious about staring at the tongue that chases after it.

"Not by my recipe," she answers with a bounded smile. "And your friend there is no blackbird."

"Oh!" says Leliana, as if she's only just remembered that there' a woodlark perched on her shoulder -- and for all Bethany knows, she has; Leliana could make friends with the wind and think it the most natural thing in the world. "This is Peep.  I found his parents dead in the garden, so I have been raising him. He is getting to be quite a big bird now, aren't you Peep?"

Peep ruffles his feathers and Bethany has to laugh, and then unfortunately she has to go on to Barlin's before the rest of her basket goes cold. "Please do not be late on my account," Leliana always says, right after she smiles and says "Thank you," (and sometimes she even says "Thank you _Bethany,"),_ and there's never a day when Bethany actually wants to take her advice. To make up for it, she always reserves the best for Leliana, and when she crosses the little stone bridge she turns her head at just the right angle so it's not too obvious that she's watching the Sister out of the corner of her eye, finishing her breakfast cheerfully before going back to slaving over her hopeless little rose garden, a burst of red hair bobbing in the grey morning light.

+

Going to the Chantry too often puts them in danger of becoming part of a community, a change that would no doubt eventually come back to bite them somewhere unpleasant.  Going too infrequently, however, is inviting the neighbor's curiosity, and that's just as problematic. They settle on an inconstant pattern of attendance that mostly has to do with how nice the weather is and how vehemently Carver is refusing to get out of bed. But no matter how many services they go to, Bethany will never understand the way Garrett can just stroll through the doors, lean back on his heels, and smirk at the bronze figure on the altar like he's never seen anything funnier. She wonders if sparing mother's sense of propriety is the only reason he's not actually laughing aloud. _Two apostates walk into a Chantry_ , the joke goes, and Bethany finds herself praying that he doesn't think it amusing enough to tell it to the templar standing stiffly at the end of their pew.  

He doesn't, but he does twirl his fingers around and around like he's missing the weight of his staff in them, and every once and a while he spares a glance for Carver. Carver had been allowed to bring his sword. There weren't many places he went without it, not since whispers of darkspawn had started drifting up from the south at the same time as the men Bethany served breakfast to on those grey tavern mornings began to wear well-used armor stamped with the King's crest.

"Scouts," Carver had told her one evening, slumped outside across the stoop (though the night had grown chilly), watching torches float down the road. "The King will be marching down with the whole army soon enough." Bethany had tried not to hear the tension in his voice, drawn as tight as a mabari's lead, and wondered how best to respond. Garrett always knew exactly what their father would have said, though he never wanted to be the one to actually speak the words.

Even here, Carver's hand lingers on the rawhide-wrapped hilt of his blade. Bethany turns away and looks for something to distract herself. The hair on the back of her neck is already up because of the templar standing not ten paces away from her; a girl can only have so much on her mind.

Her ears find Leliana, and her eyes do too -- how can they not, with that voice, and that hair shining even more burstingly red under the ruddy glow of what must be more than a hundred candles? There's none of the trickster in her now, when she sings, only the joy that echoes off the thick stone walls and somehow widens them until the Chantry feels as open as the sky, only the sweetness gathering heady at the bottom of her ribcage as she sucks in a breath, only the laughing way she turns on a note so that the whole choir is eager to follow. _How do you let go so easily?_ Bethany wonders. _How do you trust your voice to never crack?_ She searches the Sister's face for answers, and gets a wink for her trouble. Bethany's heart beats. Leliana has been watching her too.

It's only because Bethany's attention is already fixed on the Sister (not that she's staring, never, and Garrett can go sod himself) that she notices a small lump fluttering inside one of her loose sleeves, near where her hands are fervently clasped. Before she can even think what it might be, a little bird zips trilling out of Leliana's robes. _Peep,_ Bethany has time to realize, and then the woodlark manages a few erratic loop-de-loops and dives rather spectacularly into the young Lady Bryland's hair. The music halts abruptly at her first hysterical screech, and when she leaps from her pious front-row seat and begins to flap her arms wildly, everyone else in the Chantry takes it as a cue to begin shrieking as well. Forgetting herself, Bethany stands up to see just as Garrett finally lets his rough, rolling laugh escape him. The Arl lunges for his daughter at the same time as Leliana darts in to fetch her bird, and the whole thing ends predictably, with numerous bruises all around and the Reverend Mother angrily pointing Leliana out the door, even though it's Lady Bryland who won't stop shouting.

With more courage than she'd known she had, Bethany gracefully ducks her mother's hand and slips under steely, helmeted gazes with nary a shiver, making a beeline for the doors. There's a chill in the air, but there always is, this far to the south, even so early in the season. Bethany is used to it because she's never visited anywhere that wasn't in Ferelden, and everywhere in Ferelden is exactly the same -- or at least that's the way it seems, compared to the breathless glimpses spun out of stories into places she can practically see, Antivan sun she can almost feel burning her brown, mountains and mountains of ever more ridiculous shoes lining the streets of Val Royeaux.   "I don't believe you," Bethany had said.

"Ah, then you are in for a surprise when you visit someday," Leliana had replied, teeth flashing brilliantly behind a flush, full-lipped smile.

She's not smiling now.  Bethany circles the Chantry and finds her kneeling with hands carefully cupped in her little garden -- the Chantry's garden, actually, but everyone knows whose it really is, who scrapes into the frost-bitten ground to bury row after row of bulbs, who fetches buckets of water for the thirsty sage in the dry summers, who trims the ornery, ungrateful excuse for a rosebush even though season after season it remains a gnarled, unblooming thing. She is tight-lipped and shivering in only thin Chantry robes, not yet used to Lothering, still new enough to be surprised by the cold: cold weather and cold attitudes, cold Ferelden eyes. _Where did you come from?_ Bethany wants to ask for the thousandth time. Orlais, obviously, but that's the place, not the story, not the reason that this jewel-bright woman used her silver tongue in trade for a bed in a Chantry cloister instead of a spot in a tale of her own. It's never quite the right time to ask.

"Oh, Bethany," she says, looking up at the sound of latch on the gate. She looks away quickly and lifts an arm to quickly rub her eyes on her sleeve. "I am so sorry, did you need something?"

 _Fine time to get stage fright,_ Bethany thinks to herself, heart suddenly hammering, and takes a few tentative steps closer. "Nothing, no," she says. "I was only wondering if you were alright."

Leliana seems taken aback by the question, unable to quite school the surprise out of her face. "Alright? Why-- yes, I suppose I am. It's Peep who isn't." Leliana unfolds her bowled hands, and Bethany catches a glimpse of the little woodlark inside them, shaking like a forlorn brown leaf, feathers poking out every which way from a wing flung mangled and broken over his back. "I did not know he had learned how to fly."

"I'm sorry," says Bethany, a little awkward.

"It is not your fault. I only wonder if it was worth it to break his wing to get him out of her hair." Her voice begins to catch a little venom. "I suppose it is very important to have lovely hair, when you are an arl's daughter. And of course, when you are an arl's daughter you are more important than everyone else, so if one has offended, then they must be thrown out of the Chantry, yes?" She catches her breath. "I am sorry. You do not want to hear this."

"No, I don't mind. I wouldn't know much about it, really, but… you should  have someone to tell it to." Bethany thinks her foot has never been deeper in her mouth ( _Now you know how Carver feels!_ Garrett would say), but Leliana's face softens just a bit, just for her.

"I have the Maker," she says. "And that is enough. Most of the time, it is enough, but so many of those people in there… they do not think so. They think they must impress each other, prove that they are superior. They cannot see that the Maker loves them all the same. They think He is gone from the world, but I do not believe that.  If only you look, you can see He is everywhere: in the sky and the grass and the trees, but they think that they can only find Him in that little building." Her voice grows frustrated. "And they think that they may decide who gets to go in and go out, who is worthy. Butthat door should not be barred, not to anyone. Men and women and children and elves, and Orlesians and Fereldens and dwarves and even Qunari. Even little birds. _Everyone_ is welcome to the Maker."

Bethany watches the way her chest heaves with passion and can't help but be drawn in. She crouches, gracelessly, she imagines, next to Leliana, their shoulders bumping one another's. Today is a day for flying.

"Everyone?" she asks, meeting Leliana's eyes, and reaches out to press her fingers to Peep's mangled wing. Somehow, in that moment, she is not afraid, and the magic flows easily: soft and blown-blue, lighting the rims of her fingernails, tugging the little bird's wing back into alignment, delicate as smoke.

Leliana stares back at her, wide-eyed, and for a second Bethany thinks she has made a terrible mistake. But then she sees the smile creep across Leliana's face like a tentative first finger of new morning sun. "Everyone."

As soon as Bethany's finished with him, Peep shivers and takes to the sky, much more successfully this time around. He leaves an empty space behind him in Leliana's palms, but Bethany quickly fills it with her own hand. What's one more chance taken?

Leliana's fingers slowly close around hers.

+

The army does come marching down, with metal and dogs and rough boots that churn the whole town proper into mud, and tents made for kings and better glittering like elf-eyes under the hazy glow of torchlight whose smoke drifts thick and lingering over the flattened fields, heavy enough that Bethany can still taste it in the air the morning after. The army comes marching down, and when they leave again, Carver goes with them.

Mother says _sweetheart_ , says _fine_ , says that if he's going to go then they at least need to give him something to go away with. Something practical, though, nothing that might be construed to mean _goodbye_. But there's no vendor left in Lothering who's not out of everything worth having, not for the coin of a fatherless family tucked away past the edges of the town, anyway, and Mother is crying hasty, swiped-away tears and Carver is straining to get gone and Garrett is doing his best to look bored, sometimes forgetting and just looking stormy instead, and that's when Leliana finds them.

"You are leaving with the army, I hear," she tells Carver, and her lilting voice and sweet half-smile are enough to make Mother remember herself, enough to make Garrett shift his ear back in their direction. "Thank you. That is a brave and noble thing."

"Oh," he says, perplexed, "I… I guess it is."  He'd been wondering if anyone would say it, Bethany realizes, and in her mind hears Garrett's incredulous snort.

Leliana is all smiles as she barrels on. "A soldier must have a parting gift, no? Here, I hope you will take this." She pulls a hand-sized stone strung on a leather thong from her sash, and Bethany recognizes it for a whetstone, of the sort mother keeps tucked on top of the hearth back at home for sharpening knives. "This was mine for a long time, and I think it will you serve you well."

Carver reaches out and takes the gift casually from Leliana's hands. "Bit small for a greatsword, isn't it?" he says, and Bethany could hit him.

"But just perfect for your belt-knife and your razor, no?" answers Leliana, unfazed. "Just because one travels with the army doesn't mean one must become a scruffy ruffian."

Carver's eyes skitter to Garret's beard. "I don't--" he starts, before cutting himself off with a snap of his jaw.

But Leliana is kind.  "Don't shave yet? Ah, but you soon you will, and then you will need a razor, and you will find this whetstone useful." Carver blinks, and then looks pleased, and it's a strange enough look on him that Bethany forgets her desire to scold him for not being properly thankful. A good gift, then. One that says _We believe in you_ at the same time as it says _Come back, make sure you come back. We want to see you with stubble on your chin._ And if Carver can't quite help himself from casting another glance towards the hair gracing Garrett's solid face -- well, no gift is perfect.

"Well, I think I should be -- I need to leave, soon," he says, in a way that means _now_ , and mother's hands twist in her dress. She sends him off with a tear-wet shoulder, and Bethany sends him off with a fierce hug around the middle, and Garrett sends him off with a glinting, crooked smile. Leliana's lips twist too, but with mischief instead of belligerence, and she gives him a chaste kiss ("For luck!") before he goes.  

They watch the army leave, the mud getting thicker and deeper beneath thousands of boots, mother's eyes getting redder and redder. It takes them a long time to get gone, and it may as well have been a pointless exercise because even though they wait until the end, no one managed to see exactly when Carver had passed by.  

"It's a bad omen," worries mother.

"Nonsense," says Leliana firmly. "We will see him again."

"He just didn't want anyone to see his mother waving to him, the twat," Garrett dismisses in a vaguely reassuring sort of way. He shoots a glance at Bethany, eyes mocking, and when he says, "Come on though, we can go light a candle for him in the Chantry if it'll make you feel better," Bethany doesn't know whether to be grateful or exasperated.

"You know," says Leliana once they're gone, "I am beginning to think that it is rather lucky that you Fereldens never bother with proper shoes. I have never seen so much mud in a single place."

"Luck again? That's your excuse for everything, I suppose?" asks Bethany archly, but her attempt to strike an aloof pose and is thwarted by her foot sinking ankle-deep into the ground.

Leliana laughs. "Ah, but it _was_ lucky.  Most kisses are, you know. Here," and she pulls Bethany from the mud with a squelch and presses her back into a little dip in the Chantry wall, around the back. Bethany shivers with the sensation of rough, cold stone behind her and warm Chantry Sister at her front, and Leliana's smirk is a wicked, wicked thing. "If you are jealous," she continues, "Then I shall kiss you too. And this kiss--" her breath tickles the damp hair curling above Bethany's ear "--will be for more than luck."

It is good for more than luck, good for a _lot_ more, and it takes Garrett's sing-song voice calling her name from over the wall to make Bethany gasp and pull back. "Listen to him," she says, groaning, partly because of Garrett and partly because Leliana's clever fingers are still under her skirt, "It's a wonder mother hasn't caught on yet."

Leliana catches her fleshy bottom lip between her teeth and _tugs_ before finally stepping away, and the loss is enough that Bethany unconsciously leans after her, chasing her with her mouth. Leliana smiles at the picture she makes, still flush and panting against the wall and hoping that Garrett has the sense to wait at least a few more minutes, and her smile is somehow as heavy and sweet as even her kisses are. Above her mouth, her eyes flash like copper bits at the bottom of a shivering brook.  

"You can find a lot of miracles," she says, "If only you know where to look."

+

The army comes marching back.

The army comes marching back, and Carver isn't with them.

Carver isn't with them.

+

The dog won't leave Garrett's side, and Bethany doesn't know if he understands what it means, to be never coming back, to be dead in the field with the King and the Wardens, who must be pretty poor traitors to have gotten themselves killed to a man, but damn them all the same. Bethany certainly doesn't understand, can't possibly wrap her sore mind around it _. Never again?_ she asks herself, listening to her mother's grief echo off the ceiling _, Never again, nails and braids and notches crawling higher and higher up the fence-post, growing up with blade-in-hand (and it was for me that he was holding it, did he know I knew, he must've known, please Maker) and every morning scolding, too much honey in the tea -- never?_   It's a question that has no answer, no gods of comfort ever wandering down to whisper in her ears, the only thing rising up to greet her a sick ache curdling in the deepest folds of her gut, and the sound of her mother moaning with loss  in the next room until her voice is gone for it. Garrett stands stone-faced in the frost-white yard and stares down the horizon, crackles at the horizon, and the dog won't leave his side.  Bethany walks to Lothering without him, without even a basket to warm her hip. She is early, or perhaps Leliana is late; Bethany is not much interested in the passage of time (is not much interested in anything), only measures it by how cold her skin is growing under the hazy, grey morning sun, too feeble to even begin to cauterize the gaping, aching wound that had been fully half her self.

She is sitting folded-in-half against the garden wall when she hears the latch, and it would take more effort than she has in her to look up and smile a proper greeting. But Leliana has never been one to ask for propriety, for pretending. That is why this is a good place to be. Bethany feels the heat of another body blooming next to her, feels an arm circle her waist.  "I heard, sweet thing," Leliana murmurs, and her hand is so lovely and full and soft, cradles all of Bethany's cheek, fits so, so well.  She lifts Bethany's face from her knees and presses it to hers, forehead-to-forehead, nose-to-nose, breath mingling salty and wet between two pairs of lips. Her eyes are closed in reverence. "Oh Bethany, I heard."

It is a long, unbroken moment of sobs and sighs and all the world brushed blurry through the tears that cling so stolidly to their eyelashes, and by the time the minutes have started turning again the sun is already perched high enough in the sky to have burned away all the greyness of the morning.

"I would like to show you something," Leliana says eventually, lips like sweet breezes disturbing the strands of Bethany's hair. Bethany doesn't quite want to remove herself from the warmth of their impromptu tangle of limbs, the giving press of chest-to-chest (two hearts, at least, that are still beating), but she nods anyway, because it's been made abundantly clear to her that nothing lasts forever. Leliana takes her hand to draw her from the ground and leads her to the corner of the garden that the ornery, unblooming rosebush has jealously staked out for its own--

Except the ornery, unblooming rosebush is blooming.

"You see?" asks Leliana, kneeling. Her fingers can make a perch for a little bird, can pluck a lute string or spider their way over warm, milk-soft skin. They twist the blossom off the bush. "There is so much that is dark in the world -- for you now, it is the whole world, and I am so sorry. But even in the midst of this darkness, there is hope, and beauty." 

She stands, and they are so close that Bethany feels the weighty press of her against every inch of her body as she slides up off her knees.

She turns, and tucks the rose carefully into Bethany's palm, closes her hand around it, finger by finger.  

She smiles, and says, "Have faith."

+

In the end, it's Leliana who leaves for good and Carver who somehow finds his way back -- with a split lip and a new sword and a dozen bloody stories that mother doesn't need to hear, but back all the same, miraculously, beautifully back _. Have faith._ Bethany knows it's foolish to fret over last goodbyes to a pretty Sister a decade her elder, and so she doesn't, not when she has her brother back beside her: the twins picking their way through the woods together after all, following breadcrumbs, carving out a path from hope to little bit of hope. She doesn't live long enough to meet the witch, but she has that one reunion, before she goes, and she has a rose red and sweet as blood strung with twine through her buttonholes, soft as a brilliant flash of hair when she brings her hand to her chest and brushes it with the calloused pad of her thumb. There are hands in this world big and rough enough to crush her, and hands too slow to save her life. But there were two that were so gentle when they touched her, so kind, and that, at least, is a story that doesn't have to end -- that is a story to be heard and laughed at and sighed over, and perhaps someone listening will say, _again_ \-- 

And perhaps they will be obliged.

+

**Author's Note:**

> Leliana's last two lines ripped from her in-game dialogue.


End file.
